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Summary Criminology Unit 1 AC 1.4 - media representations of crime
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1.4 media representations of crimeIn the media, newspapers dedicate a large amount of their space to crime (1/8 of news is
crime related, with 1/3 of this being just murders.). Usually, they mainly focus on extreme
crimes such as murder, shootings, terrorism and stabbing. More generally, they tend to
focus on serious, violent, or sexual crimes. It is common for tabloids to ‘sensationalise’
crimes, and they often use stories for ‘infotainment,’ and to scare monger. News reporters
tend to only report crimes if the story has news values, for example, immediacy,
dramatization or unexpectedness. Crime is over-reported and always sensationalises serious
and/or violent crimes. One example of crime being over reported is when you search
‘murder’ into google, 161 million news articles are found. A more specific example is the
case of Madeline McCann; googling her name brings up 109,000 news articles, and this
number continues to increase 15 years later. Dramatization in the news is very common,
especially in headlines. For example, the Daily Mail wrote a story headlined “You will NOT
enter! Scariest and most intimidating warning signs.” This is a clear example of a
meaningless story dramatized to appeal to more people and encourage more people to read
it.
Crime in television can be divided into two categories: crime news and crime fiction. Crime
news is real life, documentaries, the news, and even reality TV. It generally focuses on
violent and serious crimes, usually focusing on older, middle-class victims or offenders.
Crime fiction on the other hand is crime drama made up completely for entertainment
purposes. Crime fiction takes up ¼ of all TV shows, sensationalising the crimes they feature,
which are usually big, dramatic crimes. They tend to stray from the facts of reality in all
aspects. For example, in Line of Duty, all crimes eventually end up being solved, whereas in
reality, lots of crimes go unsolved for many reasons. TV shows usually have the offender to
be a middle-aged white male from high-class society, but in reality, offenders can be a wide
range of all types of people. Another example is how TV shows present property crime. In
TV shows it is usually high value thefts, but in reality, majority of property crime if low level
shoplifting.
In the film industry, around 1/5 of all films are crime based, and ½ of all films contain some
sort of crime content. The portrayal of violence in crime is becoming increasingly explicit
and extreme, and could possibly lead to influencing behaviour, especially in the younger
generations. As crime becomes more common in more films, it will begin to desensitise
people to crime due to the high level of exposure to crime and could eventually lead to
someone people copying what they have seen. However, it could also lead to a better
understanding of the criminal and justice system. One example of young children being
influenced by crimes in films is the case of James Bulger, a two-year-old who was killed by
10-year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. They took him from a shopping centre
and led him to train tracks nearby where they seemed to copy things they’d seen in the
‘Child’s Play’ films. They tortured him until they eventually killed him and left him on the
train tracks. It is also common for films to glamourise crime, like in the Wolf of Wall Street,
and therefore makes people unaware of how serious some crimes are.
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